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Native Americans, as with virtually every other ethnic minority
group, were treated shamefully by the majority "white" establishment. In my opinion, they were treated worse than any
other group because the United States Government made a conscious effort to exterminate them. From the senseless slaughter
of unarmed men, innocent women, children and old men, to giving selected tribes clothes and blankets deliberately infected
with small pox, to expelling tribes from their native areas and relegating them to reservations in the most arid, worst
possible, hardscrabble areas (see "The Trail of Tears"), the United States Government's attempted genocide of Native
Americans almost succeeded. At one time there were about 11 million Native Americans living
in the United States. By 1900, there was less than a million. In a shameful disregard for the rights extended
to Native Americans by law and written agreement, the U.S. Government broke every treaty made with Native Americans.
As with other pages on "The Mighty Mitchman's" History Link, unless one is a historian, visitors to this page will
read a history of Native Americans that most never learned in school. This is, I assure you, NOT the
racist, "John Wayne" expurgated, condensed version of Native American history and their contributions to this great
nation.
Iron Eyes Cody was the name of an American Indian
who appeared in an American public service campaign to “Kepp America Beautiful”. Cody claimed to be of Cherokee/Cree
lineage and certainly looked the part in the advertisement. In actuality, Code was really Espera DeCorti – the
son of two Italian immigrants!
PAGE CONTENTS:
Plains Indians Tall, Had Health Advantage
The Plague of America
The Indian Wars and the Emergence of the United States as
a World Power
Indian Wars & the Vietnam Experience
Historical Tidbits: The early Indians of the Southwestern U.S. only ate the organs of the animals they hunted
for food, and left the muscles for predatory animals. Their meat-eating habits were changed by European influences.
One
Native American has served as vice president of the United States. Charles Curtis of Kansas was Pres. Herbert Hoover's
vice president. Curtis's mother was a full-blooded member of the Kaw tribe.
In all, the Navajo population
in the U.S. is about 250,000, the largest tribe in the nation. The Navajo Reservation, including Monument Vallye, covers 17.5
million acres in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Navajos prefer to call themselves Dine (Di-NEH,
or "the people").
PLAINS INDIANS TALL, HAD HEALTH ADVANTAGE
Equestrian Indian tribes on the American Plains in the late 1800s were
the tallest people in the world, suggesting that they were surprisingly well-nourished, says a new study published in The
American Economic Review.
The average adult male Plains Indian stood 172.6 centimeters tall -- about
5 feet 8 inches. The next tallest people in the world at that time were Australian men, who averaged 172 centimeters while
European American men of the time averaged 171 centimeters tall.
"These results contradict the modern image of American Indians as being
sickly victims succumbing to European disease," says Richard Steckel, the study's co-author. "Plains tribes were widely spread
out and very mobile, meaning they didn't live in one area long enough to accumulate the wastes and parasites that could become
a threat to public health."
The Ohio State researchers used recently discovered data collected from
several thousand Native Americans during the late 1800s as part of research done for the Columbian Exposition, a fair held
in Chicago in 1893. They used data from 1,123 Indians from eight equestrian Plains tribes, including the Cheyenne, Sioux,
Blackfeet and Comanche.
Average height is a good way of measuring health in populations, Steckel
says, especially nutritional status. "American Indians did suffer from devastating epidemics such as smallpox that killed
significant numbers," he says. "But the tribes took steps to minimize the effects of the epidemics, such as splitting up the
tribe when the illnesses started, which helped stop the spread."
The Plague of America
William Langer wrote that the Bubonic Plague was "the
worst disaster that had ever befallen upon mankind." During the 14th century, about 30% of the European population died from
its effects. The Europeans believed that the horror was caused by God punishing them for their sins. We now know that it was
rats and fleas that carried the disease coupled with the hygienic shortcomings of the time.
There is another plague
that is barely spoken of, that is the spread of disease to native-Americans which was carried by the settlers of the New World. This plague caused
90% of the population to die and was refereed to by the governor of the Massachusetts
colony John Winthrop as "an act of god." Winthrop
wrote to a friend in England, "So as God
hath thereby cleared our title to our place, those who remain in these parts, not being more than fifty, have put themselves
under our protection."
The Europeans brought with them diseases that the native people were incapable of handling.
Europeans refused to bathe, believing it to be unhealthy, and they never took their clothes off. In fact, the natives complained
that they smelled and tried to get the settlers to bathe but had little success. Furthermore, the Pilgrims brought with them
animals that carried diseases such as cows and chickens. The results proved disastrous as only one in every twenty people
survived the invasion from Europe.
Although medical science has proven otherwise,
the Europeans of the time still held steadfastly to the belief that this was an act of God being held out in their behalf.
One settler proclaimed while speaking about the deaths of Native-Americans, "their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to
effect these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of every 1000, over 950 of them had died, and many of them lay
rotting above the ground for lack of burial." On the West Coast the devastation was similar. In 1769, it was estimated that
there were 300,000 people living in California and by the
end of the gold rush in 1849 only 30,000 remained.
These cataclysmic events are treated in our textbooks as an example
of American exceptionalism. "This great opportunity for a great social and political experiment may never come again," says
the American Pageant. Another textbook states, "The American people have created a unique nation." What on earth is so unique?
What did the natives do to deserve such a fate? The gracious acts of the indigenous people are quite remarkable. They told
them how to grow corn, where to fish and where to hunt. This allowed the settlers to survive, however, they neglected to thank
the natives.
What can we learn from this? First, one must be very careful when any group says that their exploitation
is an act of God. Second that America
was conquered without regard for the people who lived there. It is estimated that over 14 million people lived in what we
call the United States, but by 1900, fewer
than one million remained. Today, we would describe this as ethnic cleansing. If anyone out there deserves reparations, it
is Native-Americans. I pray that some day they get it.
Sources for Article: Gary Nash, “Red, White and Black”
Almon W. Lauber, “Indian Slavery in Colonial Times”
Francis Jennings, “The Invasion of America”
James Loewen, “Lies My Teacher told Me”
Unknown
author and/or copyright.
The Indian Wars and the Emergence of the United
States as a World Power
In 1889 Theodore Roosevelt wrote a book called "The Winning of the War", which Alan Trachtenberg describes
as a "half-mystical imperative of "race history, a culminating moment in the drive of 'the English speaking peoples for dominance
in the world.'" In a review of Roosevelt's book, Frederick Jackson Turner, who would speak to Chicago Exposition of the World's
Fair in 1893, said, "American history needs a connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent."
The Indian wars had been going on since the time of Columbus and the record of American atrocities including the "Trail
of Tears" had left a long bitter history. The hought of what to do with the Indians fell into two camps. The first camp called
for their extermination and the second for their assimilation, under control of whites of course, to American culture. They
represented a problem because the Indians were numerous and had a distinct culture of their own, which was different to European
culture.
This coupled with the fact that they could inflict damage to whites and sometimes, as in the rout of Custer's
army in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, defeat whites in battle. Their ability to do this presented problems, so
the U.S. army, under the leadership of many of the Civil War generals such as William Sherman, were given the job of defeating
the natives. Native-Americans were forced to leave their lands and live on reservations. This struggle ended at Pine Ridge,
South Dakota, during the assassination of Chief Sitting Bull and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. The Indian Wars, which had
been going on since the arrival of Columbus were finally over and the United States, in response to the closing of the West,
looked to markets overseas to increase its wealth and to claim its mark as an imperial empire.
The opportunity arose
in 1898 when the battleship Maine was blown-up by what seemed at that time to be Spain, but later turned out to be an internal
explosion. The public became enraged and, with the goading of the Hearst Press, declared war on Spain. While many had supported
the independence of Cuba earlier, the racism of the time, fueled by segregation laws and the Indian wars, soon had the United
States imposing its will on Cuba and fighting against the Cubans in revolt, who were mostly black, to insure their dominance
over the island.
An additional booty prize of the war was the taking of other Spanish colonies, such as Puerto Rico
and the Philippines, the people of the Philippines had been fighting a war of their own for independence, but when the United
States took control of the island, it soon became necessary to go to war to establish a base in the Philippines, according
to the forces of empire. It was a ghastly brutal war in which Americans, fueled by the racism of the time, committed horrendous
atrocities.
There were people who opposed the war and the empire building that came with it. So, the anti-imperialist
league was born. Its ranks included, among others, Mark Twain:
"We have pacified some thousands of islanders and burned them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and
turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated
the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which in the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property
in the 300 concubines and other slaves of our business partner, The Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that
swag. And so, by these Providences of God-and the phrase is the government's not mine-we are a World Power."
Books
of the period: "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", Dee Brown, "The "Incorporation of America", Alan Trachtenberg, "A People's
History of the United States", by Howard Zinn, William Appleman Williams, "The Roots of Modern American Empire", "Empire as
a Way of Life", and Marilyn Young, "The Rhetoric of Empire".
Copyright 2006 by PENN LLC. All rights reserved. Go ahead and forward this, in its entirety, to others.
Indian Wars & the Vietnam Experience
By Ben Chitty
By the time we were drafted or enlisted to fight in Vietnam,
we had already been indoctrinated for that war since childhood by the mythology of America. One myth we soaked up was "cowboys
and Indians" - the long saga telling how white Europeans carved a great nation out of a land inhabited by savages. But when
we went to war, it wasn't much like the movies. Not much of a script. The guys in white hats weren't winning, and weren't
the good guys anyway. The victims weren't grateful. Death wasn't noble. War was mostly confusing and sometimes terrifying.
At best, we survived to
come back.
War taught us some things. We learned that politicians tell lies, and call
themselves "patriots," that the "national interest" usually means someone can make a lot of money. We knew that the honesty
and loyalty and sacrifice required of us in war were worth a lot more than the dishonest, manipulative, greedy politics which
sent us into combat.
But Vietnam had another, harder lesson for us. We saw the "American way
of life" from a different angle, at the edge of the empire. We enforced it, made it work. Nations occupied. Populations terrorized
and decimated. Countrysides laid waste. Societies and cultures destroyed. For what? So that people would fear us, and learn
that opposing the United States government meant poverty, misery, and death. So that corporations could keep making money.
So that colonels and commanders could become generals and admirals. So that politicians could get re-elected.
Back
in the world, home looked different. The country we served - it turned out to be a racist nation from the very beginning,
when the indigenous peoples were killed to clear the land, and Africans enslaved and transported to work the newly-cleared
land. The system we defended - it was set up so that a lot of people had to be poor so that a few could get rich, and poor
and working people, our own families and friends, had to squabble over fewer and fewer opportunities. The same culture which
taught us to be soldiers also turned women into objects, things to be bought and used, brutalized and discarded. It taught
such fear and hatred of homosexuality that gay people were beaten on the streets, just for "fun." It produced masterpieces
of machinery which no one could control, and stripped and poisoned the land to protect and increase the margin of profit.
What a world to come home to.
Then when we looked again at our own history, our war in Indochina turned out to be
an all-American war. The Dominican Republic, Korea, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico: American
soldiers fought in all these countries, occupying some, annexing others, installing puppet regimes in the rest, extending
or defending an empire. A bitter irony - we had wanted to serve: we wanted to be patriots. African Americans whose parents
couldn't vote; Chicanos and Puerto Ricans whose culture dissolved into assimilated poverty. Poor and working-class whites
tracked into the draft instead of college or the National Guard. Native Americans proving they too were "real" Americans.
The real war - it turned out - was here at home too, and we had been on the wrong side.
If this country is ever to
be the kind of country we wanted to serve, it has to change. The change has to come from the beginning, from the very foundations
of our society. The real war goes on still - Angola, Grenada, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq - are all ombat fronts which
opened after the fall of Saigon. But the oldest war in our history is the Indian War, the war over the land. Our own war looked
something like this war. The "wild West" was a free-fire zone. General Custer was on a search-and-destroy mission at Little
Big Horn. Not much to choose between Wounded Knee and My Lai, or between forced relocation to new reservations and the resettlement
camps we built in Vietnam.
One lesson we learned is also the same. The only basis for a just and lasting peace is
freedom - the recognition of the right of all peoples to self determination.
500 years is long enough: it's time to
make an end to this, the oldest war in our land.
-----
Author's note: This was first drafted for the Veterans Peace
Convoy to Big Mountain, which crossed the country in 1990 to deliver humanitarian supplies to the Dineh living in resistance
on Hopi-Partition Land in the Big Mountain area in Arizona. It was revised and reissued for the 1992 Columbus Day gathering
at the United Nations.
Ben Chitty
Clarence Fitch Chapter
Vietnam Veterans Against the
War
April 1998
Distribution encouraged, no copyright claimed.
Copyright 2006 by PENN LLC. All rights reserved. Go ahead and forward
this, in its entirety, to others.
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